His mom taught him how to sew over FaceTime. Now his quilts hang in art galleries

After a decade working as a photographer, Justin Ming Yong was "sick of seeing images."

They were up above, plastered on billboards; out on the street, running the length of buses; and when he looked down to his phone, there they were in the endless parade of his social media feed. Creating images, it seemed, was only heaping more onto this unwieldy pile.

Then the pandemic hit. Stuck at home during the first lockdown, Yong began looking for something more hands-on and labour intensive. He turned to quilting.

"Quilting was always sort of something that was like a family tradition," he says. "My mother always quilted, it was sort of always around the house." 

In fact, his mother had collected a basement full of fabric and sewing machines, and drawers of thread and batting. It was everything he would need to make a quilt. She happily obliged when he asked to borrow some supplies.

What began as a temporary distraction became a release for Yong's obstructed creative energy. Quilting revealed itself entirely anew. It was more considered, more physical, textured and shot through with family history.

For his first few pieces, Yong would FaceTime his mother, who walked him through each step of the process, demonstrating, say, how to sew.

But looking at the body of work Yong has made over the last five years, one would never suspect he was a newcomer to the medium. Yong's pieces brim with a deft understanding of colour theory and a compositional prowess no doubt honed in his years working as a photographer.

For the second episode of Local Colour, my CBC Arts web series featuring profiles of some of Toronto's most exciting artists, Yong and I spoke about this practice and his process more broadly.

This was not just a shift in materials, but in mindset. Working with textiles — which have historically been consigned to "mere craft" and so made subsidiary to "fine art" — seemed to reorientate Yong's aesthetic priorities.

He took to textiles with an irreverent spirit and a willingness to experiment. In our conversation, he returned more than once to the word "altering" when describing his process.

One method he has come upon, for example, involves tying up threads across a fabric, staining it with India ink and bleach, then pulling the threads away to leave behind a colourful, ghostly trace. He seemed to look for new ways to draw out the medium's tactility and expressiveness.

Blur, Yong's ongoing show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, demonstrates this ongoing journey.

In the museum's ground-floor gallery, he has hung a diptych featuring two quilt pieces. In the centre of both, Yong has left a distinct off-white space. Around each he has intricately framed puzzle-like pieces of bright red, muted pink and olive green, giving the quilts the vibrancy of a painting by Clyfford Still. Layered one on top of another, this accumulation of shapes and colours gives it the sense of three dimensionality.

This depth is made literal with the large cube that hangs from the ceiling draped in more of Yong's fabrics. The third part of the exhibition can be found in the museum's elevators, where Yong has hung curtains of fabrics on the walls. Kaleidoscopic and flush with deep blues and lush reds, one wonders if more gorgeous moving pads have ever been put to use.

Taken together, Blur seems to ask fundamental questions of Yong's medium. Moving from the ornate and the site-specific to the utilitarian, the exhibition traces the layered history of textile art as well and its contested status within the art world.